Year Three, Whoa, Really?

Been awhile since we’ve had a bloggy post. Since our January release stuff, in fact. Part of that is that we’ve simply had a lot going on – we had an April release party, and then, in July, our 2nd Anniversary show at DG’s (more on that in a moment). We also decided that our website should be updated, and our good friend Edward Bignar tackled that with style and aplomb – not only does it look a whole lot better, it’s a lot more organized, and we can now do really cool shit, like give you an immediate download of the mp3 version of an album when you buy a disc. Or just buy the digital version directly from us. So a big shout-out to Edward here, as well as our friend Dale Johnson, who did the vast majority of ripping and cataloging the digital content.

We’re up to 62 releases at the moment, so no small feat there.

But it meant that our webby store was down for a bit. The price of progress, growing pains, and all of that.

Our 2nd Anniversary was a huge blow-out. There were free tacos from our sponsor, Rico’s Tacos, and the most music we’ve had in one show. We started at 5 pm and went until the wee, dark hours. We had our full table of releases from the full two years, giveaways, special edition posters and pint glasses, and all kinds of fun.

It’s surprising for a local business to exist for 2 years, especially since everywhere you read about how people don’t buy CDs anymore. So we’re extremely grateful to the support you’ve given us these last 2 years. It’s been a whirlwind, but it’s been a lot of fun, and very humbling to have people buy art from our artists, and to realize that we’ve figured out how to be a sustainable business. We are not experts in the ways of being businessmen, so it sort of feels unlikely, and that’s due to the love we get from our community.

It is very rewarding to give royalty money to artists who’ve never released a disc before, and didn’t know they’d even sold anything. That’s the kind of thing that encourages them to keep creating, the kind of thing that makes them become determined to be better artists, and the kind of thing that means that the culture of our state only gets better and better. So, good job, Iowa.

For our third year, we’re trying some things out. We’ll likely do fewer releases, and then try to make a bigger deal about them. We’ve scheduled a showcase at the Gas Lamp in Des Moines, in hopes of raising our profile there – we have a number of Des Moines artists on the label now, so it’s time to branch out a bit. We’re hoping to set up some shows in other cities as well, and spread some Nova Labs goodness to other places.

We’re looking to create a zine, and maybe publish a book, and do some special shows here and there.

We were asked to do two different showcases for this year’s Maximum Ames Music Festival, so we have one focusing on our Folk and Country artists, and one for the Rock artists. This is an amazing opportunity, and we’re thankful we get to do that.

And a few more things here and there we’ll be yelling about in the not-so-distant future.